When Chris, Julian and I started our modest “conversation” about international law ten year ago, we were not universally praised.  Nor were we instantly accepted.  Who did we think we were, we pre-tenure punks just starting out in this field? And what were people to make of this short-form, internet-based content?  As Chris noted, we really didn’t know what we were doing or where things were going. (In fact, I distinctly remember admiring Roger for his confidence that we were on the right track and that this blogging thing would have legs!)   What Chris, Julian and I did recognize, from the very first days and weeks of the blog, was that we were creating a community.  And that mattered.

When we started, international law was, and on many U.S. law faculties still is, a “niche” area (which is just a polite way of saying that many U.S. law professors find international law esoteric at best, and irrelevant or dangerous at worst).  As Peter rightly notes, international law has mostly “made it.”  But a decade ago, at many U.S. law schools there was just one “internationalist” professor who carried the load of both public and private international law courses.  Long before Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In, Opinio Juris became a “connector” for many of us “lone wolf” international law professors scattered throughout the U.S. Through Opinio Juris we got to know scholars around the U.S. and the globe – friendships and collaborations that existed through the comments section, through email relationships, and, on occasion, an offer or invitation to guest blog.  Along the way, we upended what the late Oscar Schachter referred to as the “invisible college” of international law.  As part of the broader trend of flattening and democratizing the marketplace of academic and policy ideas that technology has made possible, OJ has contributed to making the invisible college not only visible, but accessible.  In 2005, there was almost no other place for a grad or law student to join a comment thread that included professors and government practitioners.  There was almost no other place for a student or junior scholar to have a short opinion essay placed – with almost no time lag and a relatively light editorial hand — to be read by the world.

Our very long list of guest bloggers includes many names that have gone on to found their own international law blogs – some of which endured, some of which morphed into other entities, all of which enriched the conversation and expanded the community.  We always welcomed and supported the emergence of the new blogs because they brought even more voices to the discussion and added structures within this virtual college of international law scholars.  We also partnered with student-edited international law journals to host discussions of articles published in the “old media” as a way of linking slower paced student-edited scholarship to a timely online discussion with multiple commentators.   And it has been wonderful to see some of those student editors join us in the academy in the interim years.  Perhaps most surprisingly, our community grew to include government lawyers and diplomats on the front line of vitally important policy and legal questions.

Ten years is a long time in any “start up.”  But as Opinio Juris enters its mature years, my hope is that the OJ community of contributors, readers, commentators and guests continues to grow in a spirit of dialogue, collaboration and fellowship.

Andrew Sullivan raises the stakes on the legal effect of the Pope’s retirement decision. As the Pope emeritus, can he now be sued in connection with his role in the sex abuses cases against the Catholic Church?  I can already see a lot of problems such a suit would present, and I am writing on the go today, but what do OJ readers think?  Does an ex-Pope retain head-of-state immunity?

For a full take on the canon law implications of the resignation, see my colleague Mark Movsesian’s analysis at CLR Forum here.

I was saddened to read the announcement last week from Diane Amann — the indefatigable founder, editor, and voice of IntLawGrrls — that IntLawGrrls is closing its blog.  IntLawGrrls has been an amazing source of historical, topical and, at times, deeply personal discussions about international law and the role of women in law and global governance.  It is and will remain an important documentary source of the views of the leading female (and some male) voices in international law and international organizations of our time.  Of course, in the blogosphere, nothing really disappears, and scholars, students and practitioners will benefit from the wonderful contributions of Diane, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Beth Van Schaack and the many, many other contributors (over 300!) to IntLawGrrls for many years to come.  Diane has been a great friend of Opinio Juris and we have enjoyed many collaborations, guest posts and cross-posts over the years.  We will miss you IntLawGrrls, but look forward to hearing from the contributors in other fora in the future.

ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has announced the appointment of three distinguished experts in international criminal law to serve as special advisers to the OTP.  Diane Amann of the Univ. of Georgia Law School has been named Special Adviser on Children in and affected by Armed Conflict. Leila Sadat of Washington University Law School will serve as Special Adviser on Crimes against Humanity. Patricia Viseur Sellers, who is currently at Oxford University, has been named Special Adviser on International Criminal Law Prosecution Strategies. Jaya Ramji-Nogales has the full details over at IntLawGrrls here and here. All three bring a wealth of experience to their new posts, both as practitioners and as scholars of international criminal law, and we look forward to hearing more about their work with the Prosecutor in the coming months. Congratulations to all!

With new students entering college and grad school, Stephen Walt posts here very sound advice on the “top ten things would-be foreign policy wonks should study.”   At number five he lists international law, but not for any reason that is likely to warm the heart of an international lawyer:

5. International Law. You might think that a realist like me would dismiss international law completely, but I took a course in the subject as an undergraduate and have always been grateful that I did. Among other things, it reaffirmed my suspicion that international law is a pretty weak instrument, especially when dealing with great powers. Nonetheless, states and other international actors use international law all of the time, and they certainly invoke it to try advance their own particular interests. So it’s good to have some idea what international law is, how it works, and what it can and cannot do.

One of the challenges for IR students is that not all political science departments offer international law on a regular basis.  Crossing campus to take international law at the law school is a good alternative, but beware that we law professors teach (and evaluate) our students as law students, not theorists.  The grad students who have taken my classes have often struggled with case reading — a skill that is old hat to 2 and 3Ls.  But once you get over that, you might learn some things about the law that will help you critique even a hardened realists like Walt!

News sites and blogs are full of condemnation for what appears to be an excessive sentence for the political protest/stunt pulled by the Russian punk band Pussy Riot in an Orthodox church earlier this year. (Even President Putin had hoped the group would not be judged “too harshly.”)  Over at the CLR Forum, my St. John’s colleague Mark Movsesian, who knows more than a little about comparative approaches to religious liberty and protection of religious sites, agrees that the sentence may have been a bit harsher than the behavior merited. But he has a different take on whether the punk rockers chose a wise method (trespass and desecration) to make their point about Russian politics and the role of the Orthodox Church:

A Russian court today convicted three members of Pussy Riot, a punk band that stormed the altar of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow last winter to perform a “punk prayer” to protest Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, of criminal hooliganism and sentenced them to two years in prison. By Western standards, it’s a harsh and disproportionate sentence. By way of comparison, when members of a group called ACT-UP disrupted a Mass at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989, they received only misdemeanor convictions and no jail time. Similarly, in June, a New York court convicted Occupy Wall Street protesters of trespassing on property owned by Trinity Church; again, only misdemeanor convictions and no jail time.

But Russia is different. Before we get all sanctimonious about how much better we are in the West, though, it’s worth reflecting on a couple of things. First, as I’ve written before, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour has a sad history. The Communists dynamited the first version of the cathedral as part of an anti-Christian campaign in the 1930s, and Christians remain very sensitive about it. Notwithstanding the politicization and corruption in the Russian Orthodox Church, many believers genuinely feel pain at the desecration of the cathedral and what they see as anti-Christian animus. (Right on cue, in response to today’s sentencing, a topless female protester got a chain saw and cut down a cross in central Kiev that commemorated the victims of Communism. Way to win people over to your point of view!). Second, the media’s selective outrage is a little hard to take. Putin’s human-rights record has been poor for a long time now. Many less well known protesters remain in prison. Yet not so long ago, bien-pensant types like Goldie Hawn and Sharon Stone gave Putin a standing ovation when he crooned “Blueberry Hill” at a charity fundraiser. So what’s so different now? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, had the members of Pussy Riot not been so telegenic, and had their target not been the bad old Orthodox Church, the media would have paid much less attention.

It is certainly the case that the politics of today’s Orthodox Church leadership may have led some to overlook or minimize the protection international human rights law affords to religious practice and sites.  Mark’s written about the case before, and has more on the legacy of Soviet persecution of the Orthodox Church here.

Over at the St. John’s Center for Law and Religion Forum, my colleague Mark Movsesian has posted a fascinating conversation with Professor Andrew Preston (Cambridge), author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of the Faith.  Preston’s book examines the role faith has played in the conduct of U.S. foreign and military policy over the course of our history.  In this review of the book, Mark discusses the religious theme in American foreign policy that Preston has identified as “Christian republicanism,”

 which Preston defines as “a blend of Protestant theology and democratic politics.” This worldview prizes religious liberty as the foundation of democracy and views it as the most important of human rights. Indeed, Preston shows how the protection of religious liberty abroad has been a constant theme in American diplomacy. In the nineteenth century, the State Department advocated for missionaries, including Mormons, with foreign governments, even though the Department often found the missionaries a nuisance. In the twentieth century, Henry Kissinger’s attempts to get Congress to grant the Soviet Union most-favored-nation status failed largely because Kissinger underestimated American sympathy for the plight of Soviet Jews.

Preston explains how religion influences the U.S. approach to international human rights:

CLR Forum: Sword of the Spirit shows that religion has had a complex influen